When refracted through California, the story of US naval expansion in the 1880s – the creation of a small but respectable force of steel cruisers and gunboats – becomes a form of naval racing against Pacific newly made navies. Californians and their national allies argued for a New Navy, citing fears of Chile, China, and eventually Japan. These fears were not only material, stemming from the technical inferiority of the US Old Navy, but also cultural, as naval programs in the Pacific threatened assumptions about US racial and civilizational superiority. Physically, advanced navies in the Pacific stoked fear in Californian cities about raids from the sea. Technologically, Pacific newly made navies (and especially the Chilean cruiser Esmeralda) served as yardsticks to measure US Navy progress. Culturally, the sophistication of Pacific navies undermined beliefs about the position of the United States as the most advanced nation in the hemisphere. These threats allowed navalists to make an effective argument for funding a small, cruiser-dominated New Navy in the 1880s that could in the near term compete with its Pacific rivals.

This chapter focuses on three case studies from California that provide a laboratory for investigating value conflicts. One case involves feral goats and endemic plants on San Clemente Island. What initially presents as a textbook conflict between sentientism and biocentrism turns out to engage a host of other values. A second case concerns tule elk and cattle in Point Reyes National Seashore. A variety of values are in play, but the primary conflict is between an endangered species and a population of animals that humans use for food. The third case involves Sierra Nevada bighorn sheep and mountain lions. Both of these species have depleted populations and restricted ranges due to human action, and both are under intensive management. Their interests conflict and humans cannot remove themselves from the conflict.

Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, same-sex couples had become visible as partners and parents, as well as integral members of straight families. This chapter demonstrates how these previous victories on behalf of the queer family made marriage equality possible. When the movement for marriage equality began, advocates emphasized that allowing same-sex couples to marry was a matter of ensuring justice and equality. However, that argument failed to persuade decisionmakers, who instituted same-sex marriage bans around the country. Advocates were only able to gain legal ground when they began emphasizing how discrimination harmed longstanding, devoted same-sex couples, the children they raised, and the straight parents who loved them. They were able to stake these claims because gay- and lesbian-headed households already existed, thanks to years of family-centered strategies. Although marriage equality is the queer rights movement’s best-known success, it came as a postscript to decades of family-centered strategies.

The chapter explores how the activities of Spanish officials and men-at-arms impacted identity-making processes against the background of debates over the significance of the movement toward defining the benemérito category and the hierarchy of the meritorious. The chapter argues that, beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, imperial agents faced the challenge of fashioning notions of a deserving self or undeserving other while balancing two opposing metrics of merit: rootedness and mobility. It first examines the unwillingness of conquistadores and first settlers, and their descendants, to serve in the Philippines and the ways such unwillingness reinforced development of negative stereotypes associated with these privileged social categories. Subsequently, it explores the efforts of Melchor López de Legazpi, Pedro de Robles, Diego García de Palacio, and Rodrigo de Vivero to use their Pacific service as a basis for fashioning themselves as meritorious subjects. Finally, it considers how debates over the hierarchy of the meritorious shaped ideas about New Spain’s transpacific connections and the region’s position between Europe and Asia.

The chapter explores how the production of cosmographical knowledge and acts of self-fashioning interacted in negotiations over royal capitulaciones, which were contracts between the Crown and private individuals that permitted the latter to act on the Crown’s behalf in matters such as exploration. After a brief discussion of prior Spanish efforts to reach Asia, the chapter then concentrates on the legal cases that were argued and decided during the 1530s and early 1540s concerning the right to explore the regions in the Pacific Northwest and who was to be recognized as the discoverer (descubridor) of this part of the world. The analysis presented here shows how the efforts of Hernán Cortés, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, and others to prove they deserved to be recognized as discoverers had an impact on the mapping of the Pacific Northwest and left deep marks on the laws of the Indies.

In South Africa in the 1990s Prof. Robert Pattinson asked the minister of health to establish a CEMD based on the UK model. The first Report appeared in 1998. During the AIDS epidemic the president and officials were denialists and tried to alter the Reports. The Enquiry developed a system to report 'great saves'. Politicians were supportive and maternal mortality fell to 97/100,000 in 2019. In India, Dr VP Paily is the coordinator of Kerala’s Confidential Review of Maternal Deaths. The KFOG was founded in 2002 and the Review began in 2003, stimulated by the WHO. The government authorised hospitals to give the KFOG anonymised records of maternal deaths. Quality standards were developed, helped by NICE International. In 2019 the maternal mortality rate was 28/100,000. In the USA Prof. Elliott Main is the medical director of the California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative (CMQCC), established when mortality rose in the 2000s. It produced toolkits to tackle the leading causes and in 2012 established the Maternal Data Center, combining social and hospital data. Severe maternal morbidity is scrutinised. Mortality fell and similar initiatives have spread across the USA.

After the US entered WWI, federal and state governments took action to suppress or even ban the use of languages other than English through the mails, in schools, and in various public settings. Moves to require English targeted nonanglophones, whether they were born in the US or had immigrated from elsewhere, and official English became a rallying cry for those bent on reducing or eliminating immigration. But such laws have little impact on the acquisition of English, as newcomers to the US continue to acquire English at rates equal to or better than those in previous generations. Without official language legislation at the federal level, the US manages to have more monolingual speakers of the majority language than many nations that do impose language bans on their residents.

Abstract arguments about crime and punishment typically focus on single, isolated offenses. But a key question for any criminal justice system is how to treat people who come before courts for their second, third, fourth, fifth time and beyond? The prevalence of these cases is one of the reasons that police, prosecutors, and judges often do not consider the system as harsh as it appears to outsiders. In their experience, many of the folks who get locked up received multiple chances to avoid incarceration.

This chapter looks at the provision of water by two different Southern California water agencies. One jurisdiction seeks to meet its water needs by financing and buying water from an expensive, energy-intensive desalination plant; the other jurisdiction successfully persuades its residents to reduce and change their consumption patterns of water and saves a huge amount of money as compared to the agency that bought into the desalination plant. What’s interesting from our book’s critical point of view is that the water agencies had different ideas about how people behave as water consumers. The jurisdiction that bought the expensive and wasteful desalination plant spent far more money and ended up wasting a huge amount of water because they didn’t even entertain the idea that people’s water consumption habits could change. Like good neoliberals they assumed that people were selfish, that they are attempting to maximize their individual utility, and that they had relatively stable preferences, which it would be foolish to attempt to change substantially. They paid dearly for those assumptions. In addition, the case demonstrates, how even in relation to complex problems such as handling water supplies, conscious human prediction and problem-solving can outperform market-based mechanisms. The case shows, in opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy, that it is possible to plan.

The fourth chapter traces Philip K. Dick’s adaptations of ancient East Asian cosmology to structure America’s ethnically heterogeneous future in the emergent North Atlantic world order. Dick finds inspiration in I-Ching, an ancient Chinese system of divination that arose to combat chaos in an era of warring states. Dick’s references to China in The Man in the High Castle belongs to a career-long hunt for devices that might delay the decay of traditional forms of belonging. The I-Ching must be distinguished, however, from the magic aerosols and hand-cast ceramics that appear elsewhere in the Dick canon, for it offers a means with which to imagine a culturally coherent America. Thanks to the I-Ching, three archetypal forms of totality—American suburbia, European totalitarianism, and Third World primitivism—that remain irreconcilable in Now Wait for Last Year constitute a functioning amalgamation in High Castle. Along the way, I place Dick’s interest in the I-Ching in an intellectual tradition at least as old as Hegel, which posited that the Chinese, putatively never afflicted by Cartesian dualism, retained access to a sense of totality foreclosed to Europeans and North Americans.